Net66: Google Penguin 3.0 To Be Released Within 2014

penguin-3.0If you’re an SEO then you’ll be acutely aware of what Penguin is. There have been several versions of the penguin algorithm but the most controversial were 2.0 and 2.1.

The penguin algorithm is designed to review links to a website and then take the appropriate measures based on the links it finds. The problem was with Penguin was that it was too evolutionary.

For example. Back in 2008, it was often the case of whoever has the most links ranks the best. These days we’re much more aware of what we need to do to a website to get it to rank which include multitudes of on site factors as well as the quality of links. NOT the quantity.

Due to how it used to be, there are/were a lot of websites that used perfectly valid techniques in their day, which were then deemed spammy by the Penguin algorithm. As such, the fallout from the update was massive with a lot of Webmasters bleating about how unfair it was for Google to judge current websites on their past behaviour.

It has it’s merits of course. But you can understand Webmasters’ frustrations at the algorithm. And now we’re set to go through it all again. John Mueller, of Google, said today in a Google Hangout that there will definitely be a Penguin update before the end of the year and it could be in the “reasonable” future.

Ambiguous ay? What might be reasonable to Google might not be reasonable to you and me. One of the major things to notice about this update is that it is termed Penguin 3.0. And not Penguin 2.2 or something similar.

That is because the update is meant to be a big one. Not only will it refresh all the data it has, but it will also update the actual algorithm, enabling it to run refreshes more frequently in the future.

Why wait though? Are they getting close to releasing it? My theory is that they’re pretty much done, they’re just waiting for Matt Cutts to get back to let the big dog announce the new release.

So, if you’ve been engaging in some slightly less than white hat link building practices, it’s time to grab a cloth and clean up.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Twitter Launch New In-Tweet Buy Button

twitter-buy-buttonAt the start of the year, RE/code gave an announcement that it was teaming up with other tech companies Twitter and Stripe. They didn’t say what they were working on at the time but now it seems that they’ve launched their product.

“Buy It Now” is a phrase you would more readily associate with eBay, and the success of this has probably driven Twitter’s new addition to their Tweets. Twitter officially launched this beta test of sorts on Monday. With a statement of:

Today we are beginning to test a new way for you to discover and buy products on Twitter. For a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time), some Tweets from our test partners will feature a “Buy” button, letting you buy directly from the Tweet.

Which means that whoever is probably paying Twitter a lot of money will be included in the early rollout of this as one of their “selected partners”.

This seems to be the first step in making shopping easier from Twitter’s platform, especially on mobile devices.

One of the USPs for this seems to be Twitter promising users of this new buy feature a chance to buy items that “they can’t get anywhere else”. The benefit here seems two fold, 1) Twitter will get more users signing up just to follow their favourite bands for exclusive merchandise, 2) Bans/brands/advertisers will see a surge in new follows based solely on the strength of the special offers they can promote.

You can go through the purchase process in just a few taps and rest assured that your details are in safe hands. Twitter stores all your details securely and you have the option to remove them at any point.

For more information, see Twitter’s promotional Video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Understanding Google Algorithms Updates and Refreshes

Google’s algorithms are often the subject of much discussion, chagrin, angst and other more colourful words. This is because Google themselves rarely announce when they release or are about to release an algorithm update.

Sure, once the fallout from algorithms reaches fever pitch they can sometimes say “Oh yeah, we did redefine everything is SEO over the weekend, thanks for noticing”.

They also give vague and nondescript warnings of “We’ll be releasing a new algorithm called [Insert_Animal_Name_Here] at some point in the future”.

There have been several rumours about Google launching a new refresh of Penguin or a large update of Panda recently. First off there were some suggestions of Google experimenting with a refresh of Penguin. Which got a lot of people very excited as they believe their sites are still “trapped” by Penguin and can’t get out until the algorithm updates.

Also last week there was a large scale suggestion of Google updating their Panda algorithm. But with Google already stating that they’ve stopped confirming Panda updates, we’re like not to know.

Now these algorithms are COMPLEX. Seriously complex, but thankfully Google’s John Mueller has taken time to write a helpful post in a Google Webmaster forum:

In theory: If a site is affected by any specific algorithm or its data, and it fixes the issue that led to that situation, then the algorithm and/or its data must be refreshed in order to see those changes. Sometimes those changes aren’t immediately visible even after a refresh, that’s normal too.

In practice, a site is never in a void alone with just a single algorithm. We use over 200 factors in crawling, indexing, and ranking. While there are some cases where a site is strongly affected by a single algorithm, that doesn’t mean that it won’t see any changes until that algorithm or its data is refreshed. For example, if a site is strongly affected by a web-spam algorithm, and you resolve all of those web-spam issues and work to make your site fantastic, you’re likely to see changes in search even before that algorithm or its data is refreshed. Some of those effects might be directly related to the changes you made (other algorithms finding that your site is really much better), some of them might be more indirect (users loving your updated site and recommending it to others).

So yes, in a theoretical void of just your site and a single algorithm (and of course such a void doesn’t really exist!), you’d need to wait for the algorithm and/or its data to refresh to see any changes based on the new situation. In practice, however, things are much more involved, and improvements that you make (especially significant ones) are likely to have visible effects even outside of that single algorithm. One part that helps to keep in mind here is that you shouldn’t be focusing on individual factors of individual algorithms, it makes much more sense to focus on your site overall — cleaning up individual issues, but not assuming that these are the only aspects worth working on.

All that said, we do realize that it would be great if we could speed the refresh-cycle of some of these algorithms up a bit, and I know the team is working on that. I know it can be frustrating to not see changes after spending a lot of time to improve things. In the meantime, I’d really recommend – as above – not focusing on any specific aspect of an algorithm, and instead making sure that your site is (or becomes) the absolute best of its kind by far.

Blog post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Doodle Celebrates Sheridan Le Fanu

Google are fondly know for their creative doodles that cover the front page their search engine from time to time.

Today is another we find ourselves confronted with a diversion from the usual multicoloured lettering. Today we see a dark and sinister portrait of one character asleep and the other floating above with an outstretched arm ready to strike.

This is of course a replication of the famous artwork based on the story of Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu was a famous Irish writer most prolific in the late 1800s and his work perseveres today.

Indeed, Carmilla has been the basis of several modern films. His most other famous works include Uncle Silas and The House by the Graveyard.

Check out the Doodle below:

sheridan-le-fanu-google-doodle

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Instagram Launches New Hyperlapse App Lets You Create HQ Timelapses

Instagram launched a new app today. It’s the second such app they’ve released recently and along with Bolt app.

Bolt is focused on the speediness of sending images in real time. You select friends to send to, hold your finger down on the screen and when you release, it Bolts to your friends right away. You just have time to add a caption, or swipe away the picture if you’re not happy.

Hyperlapse, however, has a bit more to it. Rather than just filming something quickly and posting it like regular Instagram, Hyperlapse allows you to film a timelapse on your phone, even when you’re moving.

Timelapses usually require the camera to remain perfectly still whilst the lapse is filmed. But Instagram understand not everyone has a smartphone equipped with a tripod, so they’ve added extra stability software into their app so that you can film hyperlapses anywhere.

Instagram promise the app will be of the highest quality and “result in a cinematic look, quality and feel”.

One of the best things about it? You don’t need an account to use it. So no more pesky linking accounts or having to remember yet another password.

One of the drawbacks however is that the app is only available for The App Store and iOS devices so far. I personally cannot wait to get it for my Android, but it looks like I will have to be waiting. Hopefully not too long.

Take a look at their launch video for the app below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Creates New Easter Egg For Server & SEO Geeks

Today a new Google Easter Egg has been discovered. This little treat is aimed at SEO geeks and server geeks alike. It’s based on an April Fools Joke from way back in 1998.

Google released it as a 418 Error code for websites and isn’t supported or meant to used at all. However if you visit this page then you can see the error code in action.

What’s more, if you’re on your phone and you tilt it, the teapot will actually start pouring. And if you’re on a destop, clicking the teapot will make it pour.

Check it out below:

teapot1

teapot2

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: The Top 10 Changes To Google Search [Infographic]

Google have made some pretty groundbreaking changes to their algorithms and even introduced who new algorithms to combat change in the rankings.

In the infographic below we highlight the top 10 changes to the Google Search tool.

Net66 - Google 10 Milestones Updated

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Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Twitter Will Start Showing you Tweets from People you Don’t Follow

Twitter-IconTwitter have launched a somewhat controversial feature to their timeline today. The idea of the Twitter timeline originally was to display the users only tweets from people they follow, along with retweets. Now however this looks set to change.

Users will now start seeing Tweets from people that they don’t follow. What’s the purpose in this? Surely if you’re not following them you don’t want to see their tweets. But Twitter’s idea behind this is that if your certain tweets become popular or even go viral, then you’re likely to see them.

This isn’t based solely on virility. Twitter will look to see what percentage of the people you are following to determine whether it is relevant enough to display to you. If a high percentage of people you follow are interacting with the Tweet, then it’s more likely to crop up on your timeline.

Twitter have explained this on their Frequently asked questions page by adding the following text:

Additionally, when we identify a Tweet, an account to follow, or other content that’s popular or relevant, we may add it to your timeline. This means you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don’t follow. We select each Tweet using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it. Our goal is to make your home timeline even more relevant and interesting.

It has rubbed some users up the wrong way. You can see why, people don’t want content displaying to them from sources they’ve not subscribed to. But at the same time, Twitter could be helping enhance the user experience by introducing new and fresh content to users out of the blue.

What do you think of this new move by Twitter?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Penalises Two European Link Networks

Google has a long history of penalising Link Networks. Here’s some examples. And this one.

This latest action comes whilst Matt Cutts, spam-fighting super techie and head of Google WebSpam team, is on annual leave. Which goes to show the strength in depth that Google have in their Webspam Team.

The Networks

Johannes Mehlem was the man in charge of breaking the news to the unfortunate souls who have found their websites penalised by this action. See his Tweet below:

Note that they specifically say a German network has been penalised, as well as saying a European network has been penalised too. This could mean one of two things a) the link network is so large that it spans a number of European countries and is therefore classed as European or b) Google want to hide the location of the links network for some reason. If it’s B, they haven’t done the best of jobs as Karolina Kruszyńska has posted another tweet in Polish announcing the same thing. Giving the distinct impression that the country the network has come from is in fact Polish. Check it out below:

So, good news for all SEOs with more of the spam getting cut down from the SERPs. And if you’re one of the websites that’s been hit by this update, you should probably stop the way you’re currently working.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Maps Accidentally Publishes Indian Military Bases

Google is constantly trying to bring more and more quality to all of their services. Something they’ve done in the past was to run a competition where users can upload maps to Google of their favourite places.

Dubbed the “Mapathon”, users were encouraged to create maps in India using Google’s mapmaker tool. This was in 2013 and one of the rules was for users not to upload any information regarding military installations. Google was warned directly by the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) not to collect “classified data” which included the location of bases amongst other things.

As it wasn’t Google who were creating and uploading the maps and locations, some locations of military installations were uploaded to Google’s servers and now appear in Google’s maps.

India is FURIOUS! Calling Google’s uploading of the data an act of “polluting the internet”. The Indian Govt have their own department that sanction and approve all maps and map making data and say this department was not consulted by Google before the mapping project went ahead or when they uploaded their mapping data.

Take a look at what’s displaying on the maps page:

google-maps-india-military

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Infographic: Why SEO is Still the Don!

Search engine optimisation, or organic inbound marketing as it is often known, is proven to be a cost effective yet chronically drawn out method of digital marketing. It is a slow burn process, and can take several months before optimisation really begins to show dividends. Improving a website’s structure, content and metrics, and improving its offsite perception requires a well planned campaign and a business’ commitment to it.

Because it can be a time consuming process to build up the organic capabilities of a website, people can often become frustrated with SEO and either give up on it or start investing in other, less effective, methods of marketing their websites and businesses.

Although Social Media has exploded in recent years and it is a very important part of SEO, it’s not as effective as SEO in generating inbound Leads. The same goes for outbound leads (cold calling) as they can often cost 80% than an inbound lead generated by SEO. Check out the full Infographic below:

Net66-Infographic

Copy the code below to embed the infographic on your website:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google to Give Slight Ranking Boost to HTTPS Websites

Google today announced that they will, form now on, use SSL certificates as a ranking factor.

Now before you go out and buy the best most expensive SSL ever, Google have also said that the weight given to this ranking factor isn’t very much. Also, after running tests for several months, they have said they expect this new ranking signal to affect less than 1% of Google searches globally.

They’ve not done this without cause though. They’ve released this as a ranking signal in a bid to encourage more people to run their websites on HTTPS by default. They’re trying to build a safer and more secure web.

Check out what John Mueller has to say on the subject:

Adding an SSL to your website can be a bit tricky, so you need to make sure that you manage the transition properly and carefully. The last thing you want to do is thinking you’ll be receiving a ranking boost, botching it, and actually losing your rankings.

To help with this, Google have posted the following tips to help Webmasters with the upgrade of their website:

> Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
> Use 2048-bit key certificates
> Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
> Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
> Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
> Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
> Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

Google Launches International Targeting via Search Console

Google had confirmed that within Search Console, they released their International Targeting report.

This report is specifically designed to help Webmasters with the implementation of href-lang attributes. It can help show errors in peoples code which, once fixed, will help Google attribute the correct regional pages to the regional searches.

Here’s an example of the International Targeting report:

international-targeting

This will help in the two main areas of Missing Return Links and incorrect href-lang values.

Have you used the new international targeting reports?

Net66: Matt Cutts Going On Leave for Several Months

Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google and perennial pain in the neck for SEO companies up and down the country and the outright BANE of black hat SEOs, has announced he’s to take a few months off to spend with his wife.

When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me… And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

He’ll be completely out of the loop too. No sneaky checking of emails as they’re all re-routed to his WebSpam team who will be checking them on his behalf, but not replied to.

Although he did have this to say on the matter of contact:

There’s still tons of ways, from our webmaster forums to Office Hours Hangouts where you can ask questions to experts. On the social side, instead of sending SEO-related comments to me on Twitter, you can ping the Google Webmaster Central account. Likewise, make sure you follow Google Webmasters on Google+. A bunch of different Googlers will continue to speak and answer questions at search conferences too.

Do you think we’ll start to see more Black Hat Results in the search engines?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Matt Cutts on How Google Judges and Ranks Content That Has Little to No Backlinks

In Google’s latest Webmaster Video, head of Webspam and selfie extraordinaire Matt Cutts reveals how Google ranks content that doesn’t have a lot of backlinks to it.

The lack of backlinks to a page takes Google back to when they were a search engine who didn’t really count links that much. So, they have to rely on the words on the page. Basically when then come across the first instance of a word on the page, they give a bit of weight to that word.

When they come across the second instance of the same word or phrases on the page, then it still give some weight to it. From then on it notes each use of the word they’re counting without necessarily giving it any more weight.

They monitor the use of the same word or phrase and if they believe it’s used too much, it will then think that the page is keyword stuffing. So somewhere after the first and second mention of your keyword there is the perfect balance of keywords and regular words.

The second way they do this is to inspect the domain and decide whether the domain itself is trustworthy/reputable:

Net66: Matt Cutts Selfie

Never one to take himself too seriously, Matt Cutts has recently uploaded a “Selfie” of himself on a toilet at the Google Developer conference.

Take a look at it below:

mattcutts-comma-pics-1403697296-600x1065

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: OK Google – Google’s Voice Search

Voice search and voice commands have long been a “thing” on devices, but ever since Apple’s Siri, they’ve been thrown into the limelight and there are more and more companies releasing apps and devices controlled by voice.

Take Google’s OK Google for instance. Simply by speaking “OK Google” you can then get your device to play music, call contacts or simply run an internet search.

View our full transcript below:

[expand title=”Transcript”]

Today, we’re going to be talking about OK Google. Or, non-text search. Google already has a desktop and Android app enabling you to upload images, and search matching images and documents. Now, Google also has a new and improved voice search capability.

From now on, all Android Kit Kat powered devices will respond to the hotword OK Google.

You can also call it from other applications. If you’re reading your email, browsing the web or using any app that doesn’t actively use the microphone, saying “Ok Google” will quickly power Google search and get you answers quickly.

You can also take other actions like setting an alarm, or calling someone in your phonebook.
In fact, you can even operate OK Google from the lock screen. This marks Google’s foray into more holistic search.

Voice control/search will soon be the primary way that users interact with Android devices, especially as the operating system expands into cars, onto wrists and on TV sets.
For more information about search engines and how to optimise for them, keep watching Net66.

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Net66: Google to Do Away with Authorship Photos In SERPs

You spent weeks perfecting that picture of yourself and now Google plans to get rid of it. According to Google they’ve spend a lot of time redesigning their search results to provide the cleanest and most effective results they can.

This involves removing the picture of yourself in the SERPs and also removing the number of +1s you’ve got and how many Circles you’re in. See the statement below:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results… As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count.

One of the reported benefits to having the picture including along with everything you’ve written is that it increased Click Through Rates on your listing.

That doesn’t look to have been affected with Google also saying:

Our experiments indicate that click-through behaviour on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.

What do you think to this news?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey